Political Discourse

[woofer]

EDIT: Luke Mitchell wrote a disturbing article but he makes sense....too much sense. The bottom line is that big business will rule no matter what.

Michigan Congressman John Dingell, the longest-serving member of the House, made his way to the podium on crutches and explained that health care reform was needed because “a man ought not die like a dog in a ditch.” He added that a man has a right to an attorney when he commits a crime but no right to a doctor when he gets cancer. His anger—and his emphasis on “a man” as the relevant object of social consideration—were unusual. And yet, he concluded, “This is no longer a matter of social concern, or of humanity, but of economic salvation,” and thereby seemed, at least to my mind, to have upended the order of priority that once had informed the conscience of all thinking people."
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/0082380

We are + or - numbers now.

Edit here: I might as well add what I already think....

In the United States today, we can use our belief in numbers, which borders on the religious, to rationalize any amount of inequity. We can tell ourselves that we can’t have a system that guarantees health care to every American because such a system would be “inefficient.” We can tell ourselves that we must accept a world in which children suffering from post-traumatic stress don’t get any help because the numbers don’t support it. We can tell ourselves that we must trust our health to insurance companies, that markets are wiser than doctors, that we can afford every technology. We tell ourselves stories and we rationalize our prejudices, and, unless we are willing to more specifically address the “social determinants of health,” as Dr. Tsou said, we will continue to drift toward a change far more substantive than anything currently under consideration in Congress, a change suited to the few who care to exert their will. It may be a revolutionary system of corporate medical control, or a catastrophic financial collapse resulting from hubristic overtreatment, or a medical crisis stemming from some seemingly minor flaw in the heuristics of the integrated delivery network, or just a further increase in the massive inequities that already disgrace our current system. Whatever that change is, though, it will in the end be defined by the passivity of a people that has sacrificed its own, dem ocratic power of large numbers on the altar of strange and unstated beliefs.